Opinion: The Senate Is About to Make the Wrong Clocks Permanent

Congress is close to doing something it almost never manages: fixing a small, universally despised irritant of daily life. The House voted in July to stop the twice-yearly ritual of changing the nation's clocks, and the Senate returned to Washington this week, after the midterm elections, with that bill still sitting untouched. The trouble is not that lawmakers might fail to act. It is that if they do act, they are on track to lock in the wrong permanent time. The House-passed bill would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide. Sleep scientists, chronobiologists and the nation's own history say it should instead make standard time permanent. Congress should not let political convenience override that evidence merely because ending the switching, in any form, feels like progress.

What the House actually passed

The mechanics matter here, because the politics have obscured them. H.R. 139, the Sunshine Protection Act, does not simply end clock changes; the bill's text repeals the temporary-DST provision of the Uniform Time Act and permanently advances the legal definition of standard time by the hour that used to be added each spring, which is a technical way of making daylight saving time the only time there is. States that had already opted out of seasonal changes, meaning Arizona and Hawaii, get to choose whether to keep their current clocks or move with everyone else; no other state gets that choice. The House passed it on July 14 by a lopsided 308-117 roll call, with majorities of both parties voting yes.

What the vote obscures is that the House never actually considered the alternative. The Rules Committee brought the bill to the floor under a closed rule that barred all amendments, after voting down, 4 to 6, a Democratic member's bid to even let the chamber vote on substituting the opposite fix: permanent standard time. That amendment, offered by Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, is recorded on the Rules Committee's own record for H.R. 139. Members were given one option, an up-or-down vote on permanent daylight time, and nothing else.

The bill has since stalled in the Senate, where a single member, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has refused to let it pass by unanimous consent. In October, President Trump publicly pressed Cotton to drop his objection, posting what he described as the senator's personal phone number and calling the biannual clock change "foolish, inconvenient and, in some cases, very costly." Cotton has not relented.

"Arkansans don't want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I'll always put Arkansas first."

That is a political argument, not a scientific one, but it happens to point in the same direction as the science.

The case for more evening light

The fairest version of the opposing case is not that clock-switching should continue; essentially no one defends that. It is that, between the two permanent options, daylight saving time is the one people actually prefer and the one with the clearer economic upside. Retailers, golf courses and outdoor-recreation and restaurant groups have lobbied for years for a longer, brighter evening, arguing it extends after-work shopping, dining and exercise. Polling backs up the preference, if not overwhelmingly: in a YouGov survey fielded in February 2026, 64 percent of respondents wanted clock-switching eliminated outright, and among those asked which single time they would make permanent, 43 percent chose daylight saving time against 28 percent for standard time. Supporters also note that the public overwhelmingly wants the switching to end, period, and that a bill delayed in pursuit of the theoretically better option risks delivering no reform at all. In a Senate that can be stopped by one objection, that is not a hypothetical risk; it is the bill's actual situation today.

Why standard time should still win

The evening-light argument is real, but it answers the wrong question. The point of ending the clock change is to stop forcing the body's internal clock to swing twice a year. Locking in daylight time does not achieve that; it just freezes the disruption in its more severe position, permanently. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's official position statement, endorsed by roughly twenty other medical and scientific organizations, concludes that standard time aligns far better with human circadian biology and is the better choice "for health and safety," precisely because daylight time pushes sunrise later across winter months, when bodies need morning light most to set their internal clocks. A widely cited analysis of 22 years of federal crash data, covered in a University of Colorado Boulder research summary, found fatal motor-vehicle crashes rose roughly 6 percent in the week after the spring shift into daylight time, worst in the morning commute; the researchers linked the spike directly to the lost morning light that permanent daylight time would make year-round rather than seasonal.

History already ran this experiment and the result was not ambiguous. Congress tried year-round daylight time in 1973-74 as an energy-saving measure during the oil crisis. Dark winter mornings produced a wave of public anger over children walking or waiting for buses before sunrise, and lawmakers repealed the law within ten months. Geography and the sun's position have not changed since then, so H.R. 139 would recreate the same conditions today: sunrise would arrive past 8 a.m. for weeks each winter across large swaths of the country, including Cotton's home state. A reform that recreates the exact conditions that caused the last version to be reversed is not a durable fix; it is a second dress rehearsal for repeal, which would mean more years of uncertainty for schools, airlines and parents rather than the permanence the bill's name promises.

What should happen next

None of this means Cotton's one-man block is a good process; a single senator stopping a bill that passed the House 308-117 is its own problem, and Congress should not treat one objector's leverage as a substitute for a real floor debate. The fix is for the Senate to do what the House's closed rule refused to allow: hold an actual vote, including on a standard-time substitute, rather than simply deciding whether to swallow the House bill whole or let it die by inertia. If a majority of senators, after that debate, still prefer permanent daylight time, that is a legitimate outcome of a legislature weighing a real tradeoff in the open. What should not happen is what is happening now: a closed-rule House bill, built on the brighter-evenings argument alone, drifting toward enactment by default because objecting to it is procedurally easier than improving it. The clocks will go on being wrong twice a year until Congress decides, deliberately, which kind of wrong it can live with permanently. It should choose the one morning light built the country's school schedules and commute patterns around in the first place.